Dick Dale, The King of Surf Rock Guitar, died on March 16, 2019, after twenty years battling multiple illnesses and a lifetime of health issues. His unique and dynamic way of playing shaped a genre and inspired musicians including the Beach Boys and Jimi Hendrix. Dale was himself inspired and influenced by the Arabic scales and sounds he grew up listening to, and he combined the sounds of his father’s native Lebanon with a lot of reverb and wildly fast tempos. Dick Dale defined surf rock.

Richard Anthony Monsour (May 4, 1937 – March 16,
2019), was known as Dick Dale, and was an American rock guitarist and pioneer
of surf rock music, drawing on Middle Eastern music scales and experimenting
with reverberation. Dick Dale was known as “The King of the Surf
Guitar”, which was also the title of his second studio album.

Dale worked closely with Fender to produce
custom-made amplifiers including the first-ever 100-watt guitar amplifier. He
pushed the limits of electric amplification technology and helped to develop
equipment that was capable of producing a louder guitar sound without
sacrificing reliability.

Richard Anthony Monsour (Dick Dale) was born in
Boston, Massachusetts, of Lebanese and Polish-Belarusian descent. He learned
the piano when he was nine after listening to his aunt playing, and was given a
trumpet in seventh grade, and later bought himself a ukulele for $6, after
having been influenced by Hank Williams. The first song he played on the ukulele
was “Tennessee Waltz”. He was also influenced musically by his uncle,
who taught him how to play the tarabaki, a type of drum, and could play the oud,
a short-neck lute-type instrument.

Dick Dale bought a guitar from a friend for $8, paying him back in instalments. He learned to play the guitar, using both lead and rhythm styles, so that the guitar effectively also filled the place of drums. His tarabaki drumming later influenced his guitar playing, particularly his very fast alternate picking technique which he referred to this as “the pulsation”, noting all instruments he played derived from the tarabaki. The family moved to El Segundo, California in 1954 due to his father’s work.

Dick Dale learned to surf at the age of 17.

As a Lebanese-American, he retained a strong
interest in Arabic music, which later played a major role in his development of
surf rock music.

Dale began playing in local country bars where he
met Texas Tiny, who gave him the name “Dick Dale” because he thought
it was a good name for a country singer.

Dale employed non-Western scales in his playing. He
regularly used reverb, which became a trademark of surf guitar. Being
left-handed, Dale tried to play a right-handed guitar, but then changed to a
left handed model. However, he did so without restringing the guitar, leading
him to effectively play the guitar upside-down, often playing by reaching over
the fretboard, rather than wrapping his fingers up from underneath. He
partnered with Leo Fender to test new equipment, later saying “When it can
withstand the barrage of punishment from Dick Dale, then it is fit for the
human consumption.” His combination of loud amplifiers and heavy gauge
strings led him to be called the “Father of Heavy Metal”. After
blowing up several Fender amplifiers, Leo Fender and Freddie Tavares saw Dale
play at the Rendezvous Ballroom, Balboa, California and identified the problem
arose from him creating a sound louder than the audience screaming. The pair
visited the James B. Lansing loudspeaker company and asked for a custom 15-inch
loudspeaker, which became the JBL D130F model, and was known as the Single
Showman Amp. Dale’s combination of a Fender Stratocaster and Fender Showman Amp
allowed him to attain significantly louder volume levels unobtainable by
then-conventional equipment.

Dale’s performances at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa in mid to late 1961 are credited with the creation of the surf music phenomenon. Dale obtained permission to use the 3,000 person capacity ballroom for surfer dances after overcrowding at a local ice cream parlor where he performed made him seek other venues. The Rendezvous ownership and the city of Newport Beach agreed to Dale’s request on the condition that he prohibit alcohol sales and implement a dress code. Dale’s events at the ballrooms, called “stomps,” quickly became legendary, and the events sold out all of the time.

“Let’s Go Trippin'” is one of the first
surf rock songs. This was followed by more locally released songs, including
“Jungle Fever” and “Surf Beat” on his own Deltone label.
His first full-length album was Surfers’ Choice in 1962. The album was picked
up by Capitol Records and distributed nationally, and Dale soon began appearing
on The Ed Sullivan Show, and in films where he played his signature single
“Misirlou”. He later stated, “I still remember the first night
we played it (“Misirlou”). I changed the tempo, and just started
cranking on that mother. And … it was eerie. The people came rising up off
the floor, and they were chanting and stomping. I guess that was the beginning
of the surfer’s stomp.” His second album was named after his performing
nickname, “King of the Surf Guitar”

Dale later said “There was a tremendous amount
of power I felt while surfing and that feeling of power was simply transferred
into my guitar”. His playing style reflected the experience he had when
surfing, and projecting the power of the ocean to people.

Dale and the Del-Tones performed both sides of his
Capitol single, “Secret Surfin’ Spot” in the 1963 movie, Beach Party,
starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. The group performed the songs
“My First Love,” “Runnin’ Wild” and “Muscle
Beach” in the 1964 film, Muscle Beach Party.

Surf rock’s national popularity was somewhat brief,
as the British Invasion began to overtake the American charts in 1964. Though
he continued performing live, Dale developed colorectal cancer. In the liner
notes of Better Shred Than Dead: The Dick Dale Anthology, Dale quoted Jimi
Hendrix saying, “Then you’ll never hear surf music again” in response
to hearing he might be terminally ill. Dale covered “Third Stone from the
Sun” as a tribute to Hendrix. Though he recovered, he retired from music
for several years. In 1979, he almost lost a leg after a pollution-related
infection of a mild swimming injury. As a result, Dale became an environmental
activist and soon began performing again. He recorded a new album in 1986 and
was nominated for a Grammy. In 1987 he appeared in the movie Back to the Beach,
playing surf music and performing “Pipeline” with Stevie Ray Vaughan.

The use of “Misirlou” in the 1994 Quentin
Tarantino film Pulp Fiction gained him a new audience. The following year, John
Peel praised his playing following a gig in the Garage, London. Peel later
selected “Let’s Go Trippin'” as the theme tune for his BBC Radio 4
series Home Truths. The same year, he recorded a surf-rock version of Camille
Saint-Saëns’s “Aquarium” from The Carnival of the Animals for the
musical score of the enclosed roller coaster, Space Mountain at Disneyland in
Anaheim, California.

In 2009, Dale was inducted into the Musicians Hall
of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee Dale is also a 2011 inductee into
the Surfing Walk of Fame in Huntington Beach, California, in the Surf Culture
category.

In June 2009, Dale began a West Coast tour from
southern California to British Columbia, with approximately 20 concert dates.
“Forever Came Calling” (or FCC) featured Dale’s then-17-year-old son,
Jimmie Dale on drums, who opened for him. He was scheduled to play the
Australian One Great Night On Earth festival to raise funds to benefit those
affected by the Black Saturday bushfires and other natural disasters.

Dale claimed that he was forced to keep touring to
the end of his life, because of his inability to afford his medical costs. He
had many health issues, including diabetes, renal failure, and vertebrae damage
that made performing excruciatingly painful. At the time of his death, Dale had
tour dates scheduled into November 2019.

Dale was married at least twice. In the early
1970s, his wife Jeannie Monsour was a Las Vegas dancer who worked in a revue
with Dale. Their son James, also known as Jimmie, was born in 1992. Dale said
in 2012 he had not spoken to Jeannie in over a decade and rarely saw James,
although he sometimes played drums on his father’s tours. As of 2015, his
second wife, Lana, was his manager.

Dale said that he never used alcohol or drugs, for health reasons, and discouraged their use by band members and road crew. In 1972, he stopped eating red meat. He studied Kenpo karate for over 30 years. In early 2008, he experienced a recurrence of colorectal cancer and completed a surgical, chemotherapy, and radiation treatment regimen.

Dick Dale died in Loma Linda, California on March 16, 2019, at the age of 81. It hasn’t been confirmed how he died, but he had been treated for heart failure and kidney failure prior to his death.